Brien was and
O'Brien plays with the line between fact and fiction throughout the book. "By telling stories, you
objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make
up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened.
(you carry it forward by
inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and excplain" (n.
157). What
ways
does O'Brien blur the lines between reality and imagination? How does this
contribute to our
understanding of the war ? *